Abstract
Chemotaxis assays are used extensively to study behavioral responses of Caenorhabditis nematodes to environmental cues. These assays result in a chemotaxis index (CI) that denotes the behavioral response of a population of nematodes to a particular compound and can range from 1 (maximum attraction) to −1 (maximum avoidance). Traditional chemotaxis assays have low throughput because researchers must manually setup experimental populations and score CIs. Here, we describe an automated methodology that increases throughput by using liquid-handling robots to setup experimental populations and a custom image analysis package, ct, to automate the scoring of CIs from plate images.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Emails: Timothy A. Crombie, tcrombie{at}northwestern.edu, Chido Chikuturudzi, cchikuturudzi{at}northwestern.edu, Daniel E. Cook, danielecook{at}gmail.com, Erik Andersen, erik.andersen{at}northwestern.edu